Review Index Page 5

Battlefield 1 reinvents the tone of the series, retaining the awesome turbulence of war while emphasizing a human element. Battlefield 1 maintains an impressive balance between emotion and spectacle. All the better for a series that was starting to feel a bit too clinical.

Samsung's next generation solid state drives are poised to become must-haves among enthusiasts. The 960 Pro that we are reviewing today succeeds what was already a fast drive with last year's award-winning 950 Pro. Surprise, surprise: the new 960 Pro is even faster.

Nexus is dead, and Pixel is here to replace it. It's the biggest shift in Google's homegrown smartphone strategy since the first Nexus launch in 2010. Pixel is the first true "Google phone" and they believe this is the right hardware and software to compete with the iPhones and Galaxies of the world.

Gears of War 4 is DX12-only, meaning the game has been built from the ground up to leverage this low-level API on both the PC and Xbox versions. In an effort to figure out performance, we've thrown not 20 or even 30 graphics cards at this title, but 40 -- 41 to be exact.

Where 2014's Warlords of Draenor elevated player characters from adventurers to military commanders, Legionmakes them legends, wielding weapons of unimaginable power against the greatest threat the fantasy world has ever faced.

Apple has been following a 'tick-tock' cadence of releasing a newly designed iPhone and following it up a year later with an optimized 's' variant. This year, however, Apple broke precedent by launching a third model on the same design. Yes, the iPhone 7 Plus looks a lot like the two iPhones before it. However, upon closer inspection, there are some unmistakable differences.

The Yoga Book is one of the most attractive pieces of hardware I've used this year. Lenovo is aiming for the best of both worlds: a compact tablet that's easy to hold and transport; and an on-the-go laptop that isn't hindered by an awkward dock. But going from concept to actual product, how well does it work?

The GS43VR 6RE Phantom Pro is a compact a 14-inch gaming laptop powered by a GeForce GTX 1060 GPU. This is Nvidia's latest upper mid-range discrete graphics chip that succeeds and should significantly outperform the aging GTX 970M, narrowly beating the GTX 980M too at a lower power cost and with a less beefy cooling solution.

I've been using Sony's PlayStation VR for the better part of a week and have played a handful of the games that will be available at launch. I've been impressed by some things, turned off by others, and made nauseous by a few. Throughout that time I've also been disappointed. Read on for the full review.

Announcing half a dozen new 3D NAND-based SSDs in August, Intel's SSD 600p Series in particular caught our attention for being an aggressively priced M.2 NVMe-based model targeting consumer desktops and notebooks. The 600p comes in capacities starting at 128GB for $67 up to $189 for 512GB. At just $0.36 per gigabyte, the latter looks to be exceptional value.

FIFA and PES are like Batman and The Joker, their entire existence defined by the presence of the other. You can't play PES without talking about FIFA's licenses, and you can't play FIFA without talking about PES' gameplay, because those things are as much a result of targeting the competitor's weaknesses as their own inherent strengths.

Only recently with the arrival of the GTX 1080 has a single GPU been powerful enough to game at 4K and even then at times some tweaking is necessary for optimal gameplay. As impressive as the GTX 1080 is, Nvidia's latest Titan X boasts 40% more CUDA cores, making it all the more of an ally to 4K gamers.

Sonnet is aiming at professionals who need first-class performance in an external drive. The Fusion PCIe Flash Drive takes advantage of Thunderbolt 3, as well as Samsung's excellent SM951 M.2 SSD. The result is a compact external drive capable of transfer speeds up to 2100 MB/s.

The Dell 4K UP3216Q is one hell of a monitor, period. Albeit a premium priced affair, what you get is a flexible, wide-gamut display with astounding image quality that'll surely be the envy of all who lay eyes on it.

The biggest thing to happen to gaming laptops this year is the launch of Nvidia's GeForce 10 series. Case in point, the new Asus ROG G752VS is a massive 17" G-Sync enabled system that packs a GTX 1070 GPU, an overclocked Core i7 CPU, 64 GB of memory, a terabyte PCIe SSD + HDD, and more, much more.

There are plenty of large phones to choose from these days: the iPhone 7 Plus, the Galaxy Note 7, the OnePlus 3, and many others that feature displays at least 5.5-inches in size. But nothing compares to the Xiaomi Mi Max, a gigantic 6.4-inch phablet that dwarfs what most people carry with them. This phone is, quite simply, ridiculously large.

The new Das Keyboard Prime 13 is a return to Das' roots, delivering only the essentials combined with a great typing experience. There are no dedicated media keys this time around or macro keys that can be programmed however you like, although one much-requested, long overdue feature did make the cut: LED backlighting.

Initially just a rumor, the 3GB version of the GTX 1060 is now something you can buy starting at $200 -- but should you? It comes down to the games you play, the resolution you run them at and how picky you are about quality settings.

Kingston jumped on the gaming peripheral bandwagon in 2014, launching the well regarded HyperX Cloud headset with others following since. The company is now ready to take their next step into gaming peripherals with the HyperX Alloy FPS mechanical keyboard.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has some pretty big shoes to fill. As one of 2016's most hyped games, and sequel to the excellent Human Revolution, it's a hard act to follow. We have tested this latest PC installment with over 30 graphics cards and a dozen CPUs at different quality presets to guide you where your current or prospective hardware upgrade should perform.

In Deus Ex's vision of the future, unchecked technological advancement has thrown the world into disarray as multinational corporations have grown as powerful as governments. (I know, I can't believe it either.) It's the year 2029 and breakthroughs in bioengineering have allowed humans to augment themselves with cybernetic implants.

The One X9 is a classic example of a mid-range handset. It has marginally better hardware than budget offerings - a 5.5-inch 1080p display, a Helio X10 SoC, 32 GB of storage, a 13-megapixel camera with OIS, and a metal build - but it just doesn't do enough for the price. It's not a terrible phone, but it's simply too expensive.

According to Nvidia's claims, on a GeForce GTX 1080-powered laptop you can expect 1080-like desktop performance, or thereabouts. To put those claims to the test we received a prototype of Asus' ROG GX800, a gaming laptop beast carrying two GTX 1080 GPUs which will let us test mobile Pascal on both single and dual GPU scenarios.

No Man's Sky is an unusual and contradictory game, one that asks very little of its players while simultaneously demanding a great deal. It's a frustrating failure in many ways, technically unpolished and seemingly unfinished. No Man's Sky reaches for the sun and comes back with a light bulb. I'm pretty much fine with the light bulb.

In the past we've had no trouble recommending the Moto G for those after a fantastic budget smartphone. In 2016, Motorola has expanded the Moto G line and the $250 Moto G4 Plus is the most fully featured of the bunch. It shares the same display, SoC and design with the basic Moto G4 but upgrades the camera and includes a fingerprint sensor.

The new Radeon RX 460 is a Polaris 11 part that starts at only $109. Products based on Polaris 11 will also be turning up in ultra-portable devices as the power draw is expected to be very low. On the desktop, AMD hopes to capture the entry level eSports market by providing acceptable 1080p performance in titles such as CS:GO, Dota 2, League of Legends, Overwatch and Rocket League.

Following up to our popular 32-thread Xeon PC feature, we've been in the hunt for affordable Xeon processors based on more modern architectures. Our search put us on the trail of Intel's Xeon E5 2630 v4, a 10-core Broadwell-EP part (40 threads for 2 CPUs) that can be found for less - with a catch - so we put together a system to show off what's on offer here.

The OnePlus 3 is a superb piece of hardware at a very affordable price point. This 5.5-inch handset is powered by a Snapdragon 820 SoC, and there's a huge 6 GB of RAM complemented by 64 GB of storage as standard, a fingerprint scanner, and a 16MP rear camera with OIS. It's not just the hardware that impresses: OnePlus has finally ditched their ludicrous invite system, too.

The RX 470 should be an exciting product for a few reasons. First, this is an affordable sub-$200 GPU within the reach of most gamers. Coming from the first Polaris 10 board, we expect this to be an extremely capable 1080p gamer while 1440p should also be playable. The RX 470 also only comes in a 4GB version, which I personally feel is the right choice here.